Scottish Cow

Cherry & Yogurt Clafoutis

A quick note before we talk clafoutis:  About last week's entry in Paper Chef #31 – sweet merciful crap, I won!! 

Still in a bit of shock about the whole thing, but there’s a big smile on my face, as every dish looked great.  After making, tasting and writing my entry up, I felt pretty good, but then after seeing the competition, I would have bet on someone else.  Hank did a fantastic write up of all the entries (and fish steak seemed to be a truly inspiring choice) and I had some similar thoughts – sauerkraut strudel?  How could you turn that down?  Magnus’ dish looked incredible and I was immediately struck by the composition of it.  But of all of them, if I had the opportunity to try just one, I probably would have sunk my fork into Natashya’s Moroccan Salmon dish – the flavors looked fantastic.  From start to finish, this was a ton of fun, can’t wait to have another go at it, and especially looking forward to judging (a little nervous too) and picking an ingredient for next month’s round!

…

I had previously threatened a sour cherry dish, but when we got our veggies this week, there were no sour cherries – just 4 lbs of sweet ones.   A let down maybe, but not a big enough deterrent to completely knock me off the target of a cherry-related dessert.

Clafoutis is a great word.  Its appearance takes enjoyment in defying pronunciation – at least for me.  The spellchecker wants nothing to do with it.    But the spellchecker has never tried one, otherwise, I believe, it would find nothing to complain about.

Clafoutis is a classic French custardy dessert.  So custardy, in fact, that when Julia Child translates it in Mastering the Art… she calls it “flan".  To me, it’s basically a pancake batter with fruit that bakes up thick and well…custardy.  Depending on how long you bake it, you can end up with a consistency somwhere along the custardy to cakey continuum.  This came out with a solid, dense custard feel to it, and that seemed perfect to me.

The big change I’ve made from standard clafoutis batters is the substitution of vanilla yogurt for some of the milk/cream.  It’s a favorite key ingredient in our standard pancake recipe, so I figured it would be right at home here.  It lent a great tangy flavor and the vanilla and cherries were made for each other.  It’s your simple, beautiful fruit dessert.  The only thing easier would be eating the fruit straight, and there’s nothing wrong with that either.

Cherry & Yogurt Clafoutis

2-3 C of pitted black cherries, depending on your desired ratio of cake:fruit
3 eggs
3/4 C milk
1/2 C whole milk vanilla yogurt
2/3 C flour
1/2 C sugar
Salt, a big pinch

- Preheat oven to 375

- Butter a 10 inch casserole pan, pie pan, or oven safe skillet.  Scatter cherries along the bottom.

- Beat eggs, milk and yogurt together

- Mix flour, sugar and salt and whisk into egg mixture

- Pour over cherries, shake pan to distribute and bake for 40-50 minutes (maybe longer depending on depth), at least until toothpick in center comes out clean.

Strawberry Tarts

Our fridge is dead.  It revolted on Friday and before we realized what was really happening, it had brought everything inside to room temperature.  Overnight.  Ugh.  Right now the freezer is teasing us and keeping itself around 35.  Which means it is now the fridge.  What used to reside in that freezer is now in the chest freezer, except for the unintentionally thawed hot dogs, which sustained us through the weekend.  The service guy is coming tomorrow.  Needless to say, there isn’t a whole lot of inspired cooking going on here at the moment.  However,  there are a few posts waiting to be written, so I’m lucky.

We got some ridiculously good strawberries last week from the CSA share.  So ripe and juicy they left everything they came near looking like a crime scene.  So delicious and addictive, they had the power to leave you in some sort of strawberry-induced fugue state.  Red all the way through and already so soft, it didn’t seem like we’d be able to vanquish them simply by eating them as fast as possible.

So a tart was in order.  This style (galette, I believe) was inspired by a plum galette that my mom often makes (it’s very good).  So, I guess this is really a strawberry galette.  Naming aside, it’s also very good.  This style suits me perfectly:  No worries about rolling it out big enough for a tart pan, I could just roll it out until it seemed to get thin enough to start causing me problems.  No worries about neat slices and arrangements of strawberries, just roughly quartered.  Sweetened lemony blobs of ricotta dropped on top.

Oh, the ricotta.  I’m not even sure if it’s fair to call it ricotta.  It was a small tub from these folks (Goat rising?  Definite bonus points for the domain name, as it leaves me with an image of some furry, stubborn beast floating up from the field with a "maaaaaaaaaa"), via my dad from our visit a few weeks ago.  It was like a cross between ricotta, cream cheese and creme fraiche.  Thick, creamy and slightly sour.  It was so good.

So yes, the style.  If it looks haphazard, it was me getting the tart done as quickly as possible.  I like the fact that it's not too fancy.  The biggest pain is getting the tart dough made – not hard at all, just takes a few minutes.  I’m not quite sure why I did 2 tarts, but it could certainly make one big one.  In fact, if you’re making tart crust, it probably makes sense to make a bunch.  If you’ve got a good tart crust and a regular savory pastry crust in your bag of tricks, you can make all sorts of good stuff.  We’ll do a quiche or something savory soon.  Dinner…dessert…everything is better with crust.

Tart Dough (adapted from The King Arthur Baker's Companion)

1 1/4 C all purpose flour
1/3 C sugar
Big pinch salt
1 stick cold unsalted butter (1/2 C)
1 egg yolk
2 TB cold water
1 tsp vanilla extract

Mix the flour, sugar and salt.  Cut up the butter into 1/4" cubes and add to the flour.  Use a pastry blender (forks, knives and fingers will probably work alright too) and work the butter in, until is dispersed and it looks (like every recipe tells you) pebbles.  Mix together the egg yolk, water and vanilla.  Stir into the dough.  I use a spoon or spatula to bring it together and then dump it out onto the counter and use my hands.  If it seems too dry, definitely add a little more water.  Once it’s a nice big ball,  flatten it out a little, wrap with plastic wrap and if you have time, put it in the fridge for an hour.  If you’ve got a lot of time, put it in overnight and just take it out a little earlier than you need it.  If you want two smaller tarts, divide the dough before wrapping and cooling.

Tart Assembly

Oven to 400.

Quarter up some strawberries.  Toss them with a few spoons of sugar and set aside.

Whip up some ricotta with lemon zest, a few drops of vanilla extract, and a spoon of sugar.  Taste it.

Roll out the tart dough on a floured countertop until it’s as thin as you want it.  Probably about 1/8 inch.  Move it to a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.  Strain the liquid from the strawberries and sprinkle some around the middle of the dough, leaving an inch or so around the sides.  Crimp up or fold over the edges to build a nice edge to hold in the good stuff.  Plop (ok, not such a great word) some ricotta in a few different places on the tart.

Bake it for 20-30 minutes – just keep an eye on it and you’ll be able to tell when it’s done.  Golden brown and bubbly.

Enjoy!

(Nothing to do with strawberries, tarts or galettes, but here’s a radish from the garden…just liked the photo…)

Our Fruity Girl

Fruit is a perfect thing for kids to mess around with in the kitchen.

• Tastes good
• Good for you
• Doesn't require much messing around with

Molly always wants to help out in the kitchen, but she's especially taken with chopping stuff.  We've recently upgraded her from crappy plastic-handled kid knife to our butter/dinner knives.  Sharp enough to actually get through some things without turning it to mush, but not sharp enough to detach appendages.  Funny, she gets concerned everytime she sees me holding a knife after witnessing the almost-removal of a fingertip while slicing scallions.

She's also been concerned with making fruit salad recently.

And why would we want to discourage that?  We wouldn't, of course.  It's getting easier now that the weather is on our side.  When you're in the supermarket in the middle of February and they have butternut squash and strawberries, and your little girl is begging for them (yes, she actually begs for those things - that's right before she starts begging for ice cream and cookies), it's very, very hard to say, "No, honey, that squash was grown 5,000 miles away in a different hemisphere.  Let's wait until September."

So, we don't say that.  We buy the squash.  Back to the fruit, and the helping out in the kitchen.  I left Molly a note with a "secret mission" when I left for work on Friday.

There were instructions not to open the note until noon.  Apparently, around 9:30 she tried, "...but daddy's not here." 

After finally getting to open it, she was concerned there wouldn't be enough time to make it.  Molly chopped up all the fruit she could find.  Once it's peeled (Tina helping here) you can pretty much go through any kind of fruit with a butter knife. 

Yes, there's some peaches in there from a can, but you've got to learn how to use a can opener too, right?

It was delicious.  Thank you Molly.